Eric Adams: Yet Another Crypto Success Story
Some people were surprised when the mayor of New York City was indicted for corruption. I was not one of those people.
“Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” - JuvenalThe subtitle of this post is not entirely accurate. I was slightly surprised by the Eric Adams indictment - surprised that there were only five charges on the indictment and none of them seemed to have anything to do with cryptocurrency1. Because those of us who follow the goings on in the rolling tsunami of fraud and cringe that is the cryptocurrency industry have been extremely suspicious of Eric Adams for a very long time. Here’s me tweeting something to that effect well over a year ago:
The list of eyebrow raising things Adams has done over the course of his tenure as New York City’s mayor includes but is definitely not limited to:
Taking his first three paychecks in bitcoin.
Hanging out with crypto bro billionaire2, Tether co-founder3, and Steve Bannon business partner Brock Pierce. There will be (a lot) more on this later but it’s worth mentioning that Adams flew to Puerto Rico to raise money from Mr. Pierce and his friends just a few days ago.
Opening a new “Office of Innovation and Emerging Markets” at city hall to focus on cryptocurrency, populating it with two of his besties, and then “forgetting” to ever publicly announce it.
Teaming up with a Chinese cryptocurrency exchange the FBI describes as “not cooperative with American law enforcement” to launch NewYorkCoin, a New York City themed
pump and dump scamcryptocurrency.Not disclosing his cryptocurrency holdings as required by law because he “forgot”.
Having a private dinner with Sam Bankman-Fried, the former CEO of FTX who is currently serving 25 years in a federal penitentiary for financial fraud.
Hiring a guy who ran a private investigator firm that worked for Miles Guo, the currently incarcerated crypto scammer4 and possible Chinese spy upon whose boat Steve Bannon was arrested, to be the chief of the Fire Department of New York.
Attending almost 80 events celebrating Turkey just as every major cryptocurrency exchange was opening offices in Istanbul.
Being besties with Francis Suarez, the mayor of Miami and Adams’s stiffest competition for the “Most Corrupt Mayor Of A Major American City” crown.
Other than those things I guess Eric Adams didn’t really seem all that suspicious, at least if you ignore the large number of shady things he did that had nothing to with cryptocurrency. Things like lying about where he lived5, blaming a homeless man for his problems with the IRS, and at least one alleged sexual assault.
DEN OF BROCKIQUITY
Let’s talk about Brock Pierce, the child star of the Disney movie “The Mighty Ducks” and Eric Adams’s favorite crypto bro billionaire (and just to reiterate: the man he flew to Puerto Rico to raise money from a few days ago as it became clear the overwhelming majority of New Yorkers want him to resign). As mentioned earlier Brock Pierce was involved in the founding of a company called Tether. Bloomberg has called Tether “a company practically quilted out of red flags”. The Wall Street Journal recently described Tether as “the shadow dollar that’s fueling the financial underworld”. I myself recently published a long post explaining what Tether is, how incredibly shady it is, and how it is deeply connected to the Trump campaign. Any one of those can provide additional context if you remain unconvinced that Tether is inherently something to be suspicious of.
While we don’t know for sure exactly what Pierce’s involvement in the founding of Tether was - Tether doesn’t have the best relationship with concepts like “the truth” - we do know that Mr. Pierce has publicly referred to himself as Tether’s “doula for creation”, which in turn means that “facilitating global criminal finance” is a big part of Mr. Pierce’s resumé. You would think that at a minimum that might make Pierce the kind of person politicians try to avoid being photographed with.
Then there’s the fact that around the same time as he was doing all that doulaing and creationing Brock Pierce was also co-founding the EOS blockchain, a scam which successfully rugged6 its investors for $4 billion before ending in a storm of lawsuits, regulatory actions7, and renunciations of American citizenship by the other co-founders8.
Also he’s just kind of creepy:
But wait, there’s more. Before EOS Brock Pierce had teamed up with Steve Bannon (yes, that Steve Bannon) to create Internet Gaming Entertainment (IGE), a company that used Chinese sweatshop labor to farm World of Warcraft gold which it then sold to gamers in “The West”. Perhaps unsurprisingly IGE also made Pierce the target of lawsuits though thankfully those lawsuits were only about a lot of money Pierce allegedly stole and not horrifying attestations of man’s inhumanity to man9.
As a kicker we also know that ca. 2011 Pierce was invited to be the resident virtual currency expert at conference called “Mindshift” by a friendly New York/Caribbean based financier named Jeffrey Epstein.
Now I’m not a politician but something tells me that if I were running for a high profile office like the mayor of New York City I might not want to be seen flying around on Brock Pierce’s private jet. Fortunately Eric Adams is not a man bothered by such considerations.
And that’s before you even know about the really sordid part of Brock Pierce’s colorful history. Because it gets worse. Way worse.
Brock Pierce’s first post Mighty Ducks business venture was his part ownership of a dotcom era company called Digital Entertainment Network (“DEN”). I’m gonna be blunt: Digital Entertainment Network was a pedophile ring masquerading as a dotcom company that existed to transmute the vast sums of capital handed to it by that era’s animal spirits into orgies where boys were fed drugs and raped. It was a company that could have been ripped directly from the wildest QAnon fever dream. For me personally, speaking as someone who has consumed most of the disturbing content on the internet, I can confidently say that director Amy Berg’s film about the crimes of the DEN crew, “An Open Secret”, is deeply disturbing.
There is possibly some nuance as to Pierce’s role in DEN. Given his age at the time10 (just before and after the age of legal responsibility) it is reasonable to think he was most likely a victim who turned into a predator. We’ll never know for sure. What we do know for sure, however, is that Pierce was arrested by Interpol with men named Marc Collins-Rector and Chad Shackley in an apartment in Marbella11 filled with weapons and child pornography. While Pierce was later released without charge his business partner Marc Collins-Rector was not so fortunate. Pierce later settled at least one lawsuit brought against him by four of the victims for a sizable amount of money.
I realize this all sounds like tinfoil hats are going out of style but these facts about Brock Pierce are all well documented and easily confirmed. If you want more details Hollywood Reporter did a pretty good summary of the Bannon/Epstein connection, Rolling Stone’s profile from 2018 goes into the sweatshop gold farming. and there’s way more easily accessible journalism beyond those articles if you just ask your friend Google12.
So yeah. Brock Pierce is one creepy guy. Definitely not the kind of guy you’d trust your kids with and probably not the kind of guy you’d hang out with if you were trying to be a politician on the national stage or if you were an extremely conservative religious type whose religion views gay stuff as icky13.
BORO PARK OF FRIENDSHIP
Remember the photo of Brock Pierce and Eric Adams that kicked off the preceding section? There was another guy in the photo. His name is Joel Eisdorfer. Eric Adams hired him as a city hall adviser in 2022. Here he is again, this time in a photo from 2015 with his friend Ezra Friedlander, yet another a character in the Adams saga.
Ezra Friedlander is a foreign agent, though not in a necessarily inherently sinister way14. He’s a lobbyist who gets paid15 by foreign governments16 to advocate for their interests to American politicians. Because the United States has a law called the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) all such lobbyists are required to file a lot of forms detailing who they are working for, how much they are being paid, and exactly what they are talking about with exactly which American politicians at what times. All of these forms are public and can be found on fara.gov, from which we can learn that some of Mr. Friedlander’s past clients include:
Azerbaijan
Bahrain
Bangladesh
Kurdistan
Lebanon17
Liberia
Turkey (put a pin in this one)
Uzbekistan (maybe this one too)
You may recall that Eric Adams was indicted for taking bribes from a foreign government so that they could cut through New York City’s bothersome red tape around things like not dying in a fire. It just so happens that the foreign government paying the bribes was the Turkish government, specifically the Turkish consulate in New York City. It also happens to be the case that a delegation from the Adams administration made at least one publicly documented visit to the Turkish consulate in New York City in roughly the time period covered by the bribery indictment.
Note the presence of a beaming Joel Eisdorfer second from the right. Now can you guess who in New York City was registered as a Turkish agent at the time the above photo was taken? We’re trying to keep the number of characters here to a minimum so you can probably make an educated guess.
That’s a lot to keep track of so here’s a quick recap:
Eric Adams allegedly took bribes from the Turkish consulate in New York City.
Three people employed by Eric Adams as advisers including Joel Eisdorfer and Fred Kriezman (new minor character but you don’t need to keep track of him) visited the Turkish consulate in late 202318.
Joel Eisdorfer and Ezra Friedlander have known each other since at least 2015 and apparently worked together throughout the years. Friedlander has described Fred Kriezman as an “ultimate mentch (sic)”.
Ezra Friedlander was registered as a Turkish agent during much of the time period when Turkey was allegedly bribing Eric Adams.
You got all that? Good, because here’s where it’s gonna get weird. Watch this short video:
Turns out that Ezra Friedlander has also done a lot of lobbying for our friend Brock Pierce. And the United States Congress is not even the only place they like to hang out. Here they are in New Jersey:
I’m sure this is all just a coincidence.
FRIENDS IN THE MIDDLEST PLACES
One of the more mysterious articles I’ve read in recent years was a long 2022 profile of Brock Pierce in The Jerusalem Post. The author19 Zvika Klein describes many aspects of Mr. Pierce’s colorful history in loving detail but somehow skips over both the pedo stuff and the financial fraud stuff that has made up so much of the man’s life, neither of which is an oversight made by most of the journalists who have written so much as a paragraph about Brock Pierce over the last few decades. You might think that at a minimum a writer who wished to portray “the hippie king of crypto” in a positive light might mention some of that stuff so as to try to minimize it as a “youthful indiscretion” or some such lest the reader decide to use a fancy information tool like the one found at google.com. Not so Zvika Klein. It almost feels like blatant reputation laundering (or perhaps its modern analogue, “search engine optimization”).
You may recall that in 2023 there were mass protests in Israel after Bibi Netanyahu attempted to appoint the crypto adjacent convicted felon Aryeh Deri to his cabinet over the objections of the Israeli supreme court. What you may not know, however, is where Netanyahu’s son went just as those protests were beginning20.
This is the part of the story where the heads of both the committed Nazis as well as the garden variety antisemites that make up a large part of Elon Musk’s new and improved “free speech Twitter” start to explode… but we’re not even done.
And while it’s not nearly as strange to see high profile politicians meeting each other I would probably be remiss if I did not at least mention that Brock Pierce isn’t even the only character in our story who likes to hang out with Bibi Netanyahu (Joel Eisdorfer also makes an appearance).
PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF CRYPTO
Exhausted yet? Me too. But unfortunately Eric Adams has been a busy guy over the last 3 years so we have to talk about another important country that has played an outsized role in the crypto eddas.
Back when he became mayor Adams created a lot of new offices. One of them was the “Office of Innovation and Emerging Markets”. It seems to have been created to focus primarily on cryptocurrency, NFTs, and other topics related to “blockchain technology”. The “Office of Innovation and Emerging Markets” was staffed by exactly two “executive directors”
A long time personal friend of Adams named Denise Felipe-Adams (no relation).
An NYPD officer named Jonathan Salomons who was somehow “on loan” to the mayor’s office to work on… stuff, during which time he continued to collect his NYPD salary.
Interestingly despite all of his public grandstanding about cryptocurrency being “the future” Eric Adams apparently forgot to ever announce that this office existed. In fact according to some great reporting by Crain’s the office had barely any public presence at all. And yet the office seems to have done at least a few things for Eric Adams. One of those things was sending emails. Another one seems to have been “linking up” with Turkish companies. Remember that pin?
Now remember way back in the beginning when I put “launching a New York City themed pump and dump scam cryptocurrency” on the list of sketchy things Eric Adams has done? In many ways NewYorkCoin wasn’t very different from most other crypto pump and dump scams tokens. For instance no one, least of all Eric Adams, could ever explain what NewYorkCoin was actually supposed to do. But in some important respects NewYorkCoin was actually kind of sketchy even by crypto’s incredibly low standards. Consider that the crypto exchange21 Adams teamed up with to launch NewYorkCoin was OKX, a company the FBI has said “does not cooperate with United States based law enforcement”.
Here’s a clip from a December 2021 interview with the CEO of OKCoin, OKX’s American branch22, talking about MiamiCoin and NewYorkCoin in December of 2021. It’s basically content free pablum (as almost all explanations of new cryptourrencies are) so you don’t actually have to watch it, it’s just here to convince you that OKX was involved in NewYorkCoin and MiamiCoin.
Now if you were to ask little old me OKX wouldn’t be high on the list of companies I’d want to associate with if I were running for a high profile political office. In fact it would pretty close to the bottom of that list even if that list contained every company in every country in the entire world. But again it seems that Eric Adams is not a man concerned by such details, at least if we consider that Denise Felipe-Adams, one of the “executive directors” of Adams’s aforementioned semi-secret “Office of Innovation and Emerging Markets”, was apparently flown to Singapore for the Token2049 cryptocurrency conference23 in 2022 from which she tweeted about “winning” with OKX.
It’s also probably just a coincidence that OKX, a company that is not allowed to operate within the United States, is sponsoring New York’s Tribeca Festival this year.
Just to bring it all full circle let’s remember that in 2021 Sam Bankman-Fried of FTX fame bribed the Chinese government $150 million to release a billion dollars worth of crypto from his company’s trading accounts on… wait for it… OKX24.
After which he had dinner with Eric Adams:
Just to clarify that timeline:
[2021] SBF pays a $150 million bribe to the Chinese government to get his funds off of OKX and Huobi.
[2022 March] Eric Adams has dinner with SBF.
[2022 September] Denise Felipe-Adams is flown to Singapore for a crypto conference where she tweets about winning with OKX.
I’m sure all of this was totally on the level and Adams’s reasons for working with OKX to launch a New York City themed pump and dump scam cryptocurrency were totally kosher but still there’s some other stuff that makes me raise my eyebrows about Eric Adams, like the fact that he appointed a guy named Robert Tucker (new character) to be the chief of the Fire Department of New York (FDNY). Robert Tucker has never been a firefighter in New York or any other place but he has worked for Miles Guo25, a seriously scary now imprisoned crypto fraudster connected to Chinese intelligence who has almost certainly murdered multiple people and on whose yacht Steve Bannon was arrested26.
Here they are, I suspect in the lavish Park Avenue apartment that Miles Guo attempted to firebomb the day he was finally arrested:
I’m sure that’s just a coincidence too.
THE THREADS
Most of these articles start their life as threads on The Privatized Public Square and this one is no different. Since not all of the interesting information survived the migration here’s the original threads:
Thread about Adams’s semi-secret crypto focused “Office of Innovation and Emerging Markets".
Thread about Brock Pierce’s Vice Presidential pick when he ran for president in 202027.
Additionally here’s some other things worth looking at:
At least, not yet.
It’s never been proven that Brock Pierce ever actually controlled a billion dollars worth of real world assets but that’s what we call very rich people these days and Brock Pierce was (and probably still is) very rich at some point.
Sort of. No one really knows how Tether was founded.
And I strongly suspect FTX connected.
He allegedly lived with his partner in Fort Lee, New Jersey which made him ineligible to run for the mayoralty.
“Rugged” is short for “rug pulled” which is crypto-speak for “stole”.
When you consider that the government proposed fining EOS just $24 million for the theft of $4 billion, giving Brock Pierce and friends a total take of roughly $3.976 billion, EOS is probably the most profitable scam in human history.
One of the other co-founders recently predicted a biblical apocalypse.
That’s foreshadowing.
I will just throw out there that around this very same time in history Marbella was a major nexus of the Kinahan super cartel, Europe’s premiere purveyor of coca leaf products, which in turn made Marbella a major demand center in the international money laundering industry.
DuckDuckGo might be more appropriate given the queries you might find yourself typing. Better yet use Tor.
There’s that foreshadowing again.
At least depending on how inherently sinister you find the idea of American lobbyists taking money from autocratic governments in exchange for attempting to influence American laws and/or foreign policy. Some people seem to think this is just a really good way to organize democracy. Specifically people like Roger Stone and Paul Manafort who pioneered the art of taking money from murderous regimes.
Technically his company (The Friedlander Consulting Group FKA The Friedlander Group) gets paid.
And some American corporations.
Specifically the Lebanese Option Party.
Two of them have already resigned (Eisdorfer and Caban).
I hesitate to use the word “journalist”.
You may also not know that Aryeh Deri is a crypto adjacent bro and probably a crypto bro but I never got around to finishing that substack post and it’s too complicated to explain in this one.
A crypto “exchange” is a marketplace where you buy and sell crypto (usually on a website).
Not really. Most of the Chinese crypto exchanges created fake “American branches” that were created to distract American regulators in what Binance executives called the “Tai Chi strategy”. The employees of these fake American branches were almost always in the same office in China as the offshore part of the company.
Probably on New York City taxpayer’s dime though that’s still unproven.
And Huobi, an even sketchier Chinese crypto exchange than OKX.
Probably doing something related to surveillance or cybersecurity considering that’s what the company Tucker was CEO of when the picture was taken did.
The New Yorker did a good piece on Guo before he was arrested as did Vice and others.
He really did run for president.
Wow! This is a lot to take in. Two thoughts: very likely that Pierce was a victim turned predator. Is likely that the FBI itself set the fire in Guo’s apartment to CYA? Remotely firebombing seems a little too James Bondish even for the Chinese government. One thing is for certain: this will not end well. I wonder if Trump has gone full schizo or still the same old grifter? Hopefully the latter… peace brother!
Amazing piece, so much fuckery going on in the crypto space it’s hard to keep up with.